in the procession of Macbeth or Henry Vlllth. But what assistance to the poet
or ornament to the poem these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Noth
ing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the
apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling in which the passion is
greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single
representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to
be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from
the song of Deborah. 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet
he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.'8 1815 1817
From Lectures on Shakespeare' [FANCY AND IMAGINATION IN SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY] In the preceding lecture we have examined with what armor clothed and
with what titles authorized Shakespeare came forward as a poet to demand
the throne of fame as the dramatic poet of England; we have now to observe
5. For the public welfare (Latin). ness of 'impassioned feelings.' 6. In De Vulgari Eloquentia ('On the Speech of 1. Although Coleridge's series of public lectures the people') Dante discusses?and affirms?the on Shakespeare and other poets contained much
fitness for poetry of the unlocaiized Italian vernac-of his best criticism, he published none of this
ular. material, leaving only fragmentary remains of his
7. Wordsworth: 'the manner in which we associ-lectures in notebooks, scraps of manuscript, and ate ideas in a state of excitement.' notes written in the margins of books. The follow
8. Judges 5.27. Cited by Wordsworth in a note to ing selections, which develop some of the principal The Thorn as an example of the natural repetitious-ideas presented in Biographia Literaria, reproduce
.
48 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
and retrace the excellencies which compelled even his contemporaries to seat
him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for
the same honor. Hereafter we shall endeavor to make out the title of the
English drama, as created by and existing in Shakespeare, and its right to the
supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. I have endeavored to prove that
he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet?
and that had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry the Fourth, no Twelfth Night
appeared, we must have admitted that Shakespeare possessed the chief if not
all the requisites of a poet?namely, deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty,
both as exhibited to the eye in combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet
and appropriate melody (with the exception of Spenser he is [the sweetest of
English poets]); that these feelings were under the command of his own will?
that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular
being, and felt and made others feel, on subjects [in] no way connected with
himself, except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty, by which
a great mind becomes that which it meditates on. To this we are to add the
affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could
have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately the very min
utest beauties of the external world. Next, we have shown that he possessed
fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the
main by some one point or more of likeness distinguished.2 Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band?
So white a friend engirts so white a foe. Still mounting, we find undoubted proof in his mind of imagination, or the
power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others and by a
sort of fusion to force many into one?that which after showed itself in such
might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the
